


Practical Men

by The_Grynne



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003), Deadwood
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-11-10
Updated: 2006-11-10
Packaged: 2017-10-03 01:08:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Grynne/pseuds/The_Grynne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One collaborator to another, he seems to say with a tiny bob of his dark head.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Practical Men

**Practical Men**

Your old friends, what friends you had, no longer even acknowledge you. They stop and swerve to avoid you before glowering at your back. Some spit on the ground when you walk through the ramshackle camp that is New Caprica - your dream, once, still hilariously posturing as a city. The hostility of strangers is hard enough to take; the dead, accusing eyes of old comrades is like poison in your heart.

The crops won't take to the arid soil here, but at least since the cylon arrived no one has had to die because of starvation. (They die quicker, from other things.) You sign your traitor's name for consignments of rice, sugar, corn - and coffee, a luxury reserved for Friends of the Cylon Occupation, most especially Gaius Baltar. Don't ask where the cylon get these things. The person who organises the transfer of essential supplies is human. A small, efficient man with soulful eyes and a neat beard. He takes the clipboard from your hands; the provisions are secure for another week. Then he offers you the first smile you've received all day. One collaborator to another, he seems to say with a tiny bob of his dark head.

You find out, back on Galactica, that he was a community leader from Picon, that he took in children orphaned during the resistance, and that he lived with a beautiful woman who wasn't his wife because none of the priests of his outsider's religion had survived the First Exodus, and it wouldn't have mattered even if one did because the woman he lived with was a gentile. All this you know because you went up and stood next to her at the memorial service, the one held for those that Roslin's general pardon came too late to save. He was a good man, my Sol, she wept into your shoulder. _My soul my soul._ I know he was, you told her, because you're still alive. One collaborator to another.

THE END


End file.
